When the Oklahoma City Thunder started building its franchise in 2008, it went beyond just organizing a great basketball team. The franchise knew it needed a business strategy that focused on its fans.

Thunder owners, then, set out to personalize the fan experience. The Thunder service team promoted various campaigns, collected metric-based research data and shaped its training programs -- and deployed Microsoft Dynamics .

"Our vision was to make the Thunder the most fan-centric organization in professional sports," said Scott Loft, vice president of Ticket Sales, Retention and Database Operations for Oklahoma City Thunder. "When fans enter the Chesapeake Energy Arena for a Thunder home game, we want them to feel like guests rather than customers or numbers."

Slam Dunk Customer Service

Microsoft Dynamics CRM created accountability within and standardization of the company's guest care best practices, and now serves as the centralized repository for all customer information, providing a 360-degree view of franchise guests. According to the team's Net Promoter Score, a system that helps businesses measure customer satisfaction, the Thunder has an NPS of 91.2 percent -- more than twice as high as the NBA average.

"When guests share their Twitter and Facebook profile names, that opens another channel of engagement between our organization and customers," Loft said.

The franchise provides guests with ways to keep in touch with the team and other fans via social media and encourages fan feedback through telephone, e-mail and online surveys. This data helps the Thunder's customer support team drive consistent improvements.

All interactions are compiled into a monthly trending report that delivers a snapshot view of the current level of customer service. At the Microsoft Dynamics Convergence 2013 conference in New Orleans, the Thunder shared how these customer satisfaction scores have soared since the team implemented Microsoft Dynamics CRM. In fact, the Thunder has been ranked the top NBA team in terms of the overall fan experience; 99 percent of guests have rated their overall experience as "good" or "excellent."

Hoop-to-Hoop Integration

We caught up with Rob Helm, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft, to get his feedback on Microsoft Dynamics CRM's social media integration. He told us CRM is part of a bigger picture that Microsoft sees.

"Microsoft can go after the marketing function at organizations and offer them both an on-ramp to social networks and the ability to manage the resulting flood of customer contacts that they'll get when they start playing there," Helm said.

"Microsoft has this unique ability to deliver an end-to-end story where they connect inbound to social networks outbound and then manage customers. There is also a tie-in to other systems inside the company, like the SharePoint portal. It's hard to find a vendor that has all the pieces like Microsoft does."

Thanks for the great information, Jennifer! It's amazing to see the benefits that social CRM offers, even for a professional basketball team. I have stated to many of my colleagues that SCRM has the potential to provide market expansion and increase revenue, throughout any type of business/organization. Furthermore, office suites that integrate SCRM like GreenRope, provide the unique ability to predict potential consumer trends. Not only does SCRM organize the influx of customer data, the accessibility allows businesses to quickly target and resolve all customer inquiries. In today's social environment, its great to see the OKC Thunder taking advantage of SCRM. Not only has this added to their marketing success, it may have allowed them to solidify their public popularity even though they have been characterized as a "small market franchise."

Todd Schoepflin:

Posted: 2013-04-05 @ 2:58pm PT

Glad it's working for the Thunder, but it's still sad that Bennett stole the Sonics with such a lack of integrity. Ironically, Balmer may be the way to partially resurrect the Sonics.